Pierre and Luce — 8 - Section 8

* * * * * THEY were five friends about the same age, met together at the house of one of them, five young comrades at their studies whom a certain conformity of mind and a first sorting out of opinions had grouped together apart from the rest.

And yet no two of them who thought the same way.

Beneath the pretended unanimity of forty millions of Frenchmen there are forty million brains that keep right to themselves.

Thought in France is like the country, a state composed of small properties.

From one bit of farm to the other the five friends tried to exchange their ideas across the hedge.

But they did that only to affirm themselves more imperatively in their several opinions, each for himself.

Each one, for that matter, liberal in mind, and, if not all of them republicans, all foes of intellectual or social reaction, or any backward return.

Jacques See was the most blazingly in favor of the war.

This generous young Jew had espoused all the passions the spirit of France contained.

All through Europe his cousins in Israel espoused like him the causes and the ideas of their adopted countries.

Moreover, according to their method, they even had a tendency toward an exaggeration of whatever they adopted.

This fine fellow, with ardent but rather heavy voice and look, with his regular features as if marked with a stamp imposed, was more pronounced in his convictions than was needful, and violent in contradiction.

According to him, all that was necessary was a crusade made by the democracies to deliver the nations and extinguish war.

Four years of the philanthropic slaughterhouse had not convinced him.

He was one of those who will never accept the flat contradiction of facts.

He had a twofold pride, the secret pride of his race, which race he wished to rehabilitate, and his pride personal that wanted to prove itself right.

He wished this all the more because he was not entirely sure of it.

His sincere idealism served as a screen against exacting instincts too long suppressed and to a need for action and adventure, which was no less sincere.

Antoine Naude, he too, was for the war.

But that was because he could not do otherwise.

This big honest young _bourgeois_, with his rosy cheeks, placid and keen, who had a short breath and rolled his _r_ with the pretty grace of the provinces of the Centre, contemplated with a quiet smile the enthusiastic transports of his friend See; or else he knew how on occasion to make him climb a tree with a careless word;--but the big, lazy fellow took precious care not to follow him up!

What is the use of getting in a sweat for or against what does not depend upon ourselves?

It is only in the tragedies that one finds the heroic and loquacious conflict between duty and one's pleasure.

When we have no choice, we do our duty without wasting words.

It was no jollier on that account.

Naude neither admired nor recriminated.

His good sense told him that, once the train started and the war in motion, it was necessary to roll along with it; there was no other position to take.

As for searching after the responsibilities, that was merely time lost.

When I am forced to fight it gives me a gay outlook, a pretty consolation, to know that I might have not fought--if things had really been ...

what they haven't been!

The responsibilities?

Now for Bernard Saisset they were exactly the primordial question; he was obstinate in disentangling that knot of snakes; or rather, like a little Fury, he brandished the snakes above his head.

A frail boy, distinguished looking, impassioned, too many nerves, burning with a too lively sensitiveness of the brain, belonging to the wealthy _bourgeoisie_ and an old republican family which had played a part in the highest offices of State, he professed, through reaction, all the ultra-revolutionary passions.

He had inspected too near at hand the masters of the day and what they brought forth.

He accused all the governments--and by preference his own.

He talked of nothing any more but of syndicalists and bolsheviki; he had just made a discovery of them and he fraternized with them, as if he had known them from infancy.

Without knowing too well which, he saw no remedy save in a total upset of society.

He hated war; but he would have sacrificed himself with joy in a war between classes--a war against his own class, a war against himself.

The fourth in the group, Claude Puget, sat by at these jousts of words with a cold and somewhat disdainful attention.

Coming from the very undermost _bourgeoisie_, poor, uprooted from his province by a passing inspector of schools who remarked his intelligence, prematurely deprived of the intimate influence of his family, this winner of a _Lycee_ scholarship, accustomed to depend upon himself alone, to live only with himself, merely lived by himself and for himself.

An egotistic philosopher given to analysis of the soul, voluptuously immersed in his introspection like a big cat curled up in a ball, he was not moved at all by the agitation of the others.

These three friends of his who never could agree among themselves he put in the same bag--with the "populars."

Did not all three forfeit their social rank by wishing to partake in the aspirations of the mob?

Truth to say, the mob was a different crowd for each of them.

But for Puget the crowd, whatever it might be, was always wrong.

The crowd was the enemy.

The intellect should remain alone and follow its particular laws and found, apart from the vulgar crowd and the State, the small and closed kingdom of thought.

And Pierre, seated near the window, distractedly looked out of doors, and dreamed.

Generally speaking, he mingled in these juvenile assaults with passion.

But today it seemed to him a humming of idle words which he listened to from so far away, oh, so far away!

in a bored and mocking demi-torpidity.

Plunged in their discussions, the others were a long while in remarking his muteness.

But at last Saisset, accustomed to find in Pierre an echo of his verbal bolshevisms, was astonished at failing to hear it reverberate any more and put the question to him.

Pierre waked up in a hurry, reddened, smiled and asked: "What were you talking about?"

They were most indignant.

"Why, you haven't been listening to anything!"

"What, then, were you brooding about?"

asked Naude.

A little confused, a little impertinent, Pierre replied: "About the springtide.

It has come back all right without your permission.

It will clear out without our help."

All of them crushed him with their disdain.

Naude taunted him as a "poet."

And Jacques See as a _poseur_.

Puget alone fixed his eyes on him with curiosity and irony in them, his wrinkled eyes with their cold pupils.

"Flying ant!"

"What?"

questioned Pierre, rather amused.

"Beware of the wings!"

said Puget.

"It's the nuptial flight.

It only lasts one hour."

"Life does not last much more," said Pierre.

* * * * * DURING Passion Week they saw one another every day.

Pierre went to see Luce in her isolated house.

The thin and hungry garden was waking up.

They passed the afternoon there.

They felt now an antipathy toward Paris and the crowd, against life also.

At certain moments even, a moral paralysis kept them silent, immovable, one close to the other, without a wish to stir.

A strange feeling was at work in both of them.

They were afraid!

Fear--in the measure that the day approached when they should give themselves the one to the other--fear through excess of love, through the purification of soul which the ugly things, the cruelties, the shameful facts of life frightened, and which, in an intoxication of passion and melancholy, dreamed of being delivered from it all....

They said nothing about it to each other.

The most of their time they passed in babbling gently about their future lodgings, their work in common, their little household.

They arranged in advance, down to the smallest item of their installation, the furniture, the wall papers, the spot for each object.

A true woman, the evocation of these tender nothings, intimate and familiar images of daily life, moved Luce sometimes to tears.

They tasted the exquisite small joys of the hearth of the future....

They knew that nothing of that sort would occur--Pierre through the presentiment of his native pessimism--Luce through the clairvoyance of love which understood the practical impossibility of the marriage....

That is why they hasted to enjoy it in their dream.

And each concealed from the other the certainty felt that it would not be anything else but a dream.

Each one believed that this secret was personal and watched, deeply touched, over the other's illusion.

When they had exhausted the mournful delights of the impossible future they were overcome with fatigue, as if they had lived through all of it.

Then they rested themselves, seated under the arbor with the dried-up vines, while the sun melted the congealed sap; and, Pierre's head on Luce's shoulder, they listened dreamily to the humming of the earth.

Behind the passing clouds the young sun of March played bo-peep, laughed and disappeared.

Clear sunrays, somber shadows ran across the plain as in a soul run joys and sorrows.

"Luce," said Pierre abruptly, "don't you recollect?...

It was long, long ago....

Even then we were like this...."

"Yes," said Luce, "that's true.

All of it, I remember all....

But where were we?..."

They amused themselves by trying to recall under what shapes they had known one another before.

Already as human beings?

Perhaps.

But certainly at that time Pierre was the girl and Luce the lover....

Birds in the air?

When she was a small child her mother told Luce that she had been a little wild goose that had fallen down the chimney; ah!

she had thoroughly broken her wings!...

But where particularly they enjoyed finding themselves again was in the elementary fluid forms that penetrate one another, twist about and untwist like the volutes of a dream or else of smoke: white clouds that dissolve in the gulf of the sky, little waves that play about, the rain on the soil, the dew on the bush, seeds of dandelion that swim at the beck of the air....

But the wind carries them away.

Provided it does not begin to blow again and that we shall not lose each other any more for all eternity!...

But he decided: "As for me, I believe that we never did quit one another; we were together just as we are now, lying against each other; only, we were asleep and we dreamed dreams.

From time to time we awake....

With difficulty....

I feel your breath, your cheek against mine....

One makes a great effort; we bring our mouths together....

One falls back asleep....

Darling, darling, I am here, I hold your hand, don't let me go!...

Now it is not quite yet the hour, spring hardly shows the end of his icy nose...."

"Like yours," said Luce.

"Very soon we shall awake on a fine summer's day...."

"We ourselves shall be that fine day of summer," says Luce.

"The warm shade of the limetrees, the sun through the branches, the bees that sing...."

"The peach on the warm wall and its perfumed pulp...."

"The noon spell of the harvesters and their golden sheaves...."

"The lazy cattle that chew their cud...."

"And at evensong, by the sunset like a flowerset pool, the liquid light that runs across the tops of the fields...."

"Yes, we shall be everything," quoth Luce, "everything that is good and sweet to see and to have, to kiss and to eat, to touch and inhale....

What's left over we shall leave to them," she added, pointing to the city and its smoke wreaths.

She laughed.

Then, kissing her friend, she said: "We have chanted our little duet well.

What do you say, my friend Pierrot?"

"Yea, verily, Jessica," he replied.

"My poor Pierrot," she returned, "we are none too well equipped for this world, where people know how to sing nothing else but the _Marseillaise_!..."

"Good enough if they even knew how to sing that!"

"We have got off at the wrong station, we left the train too early."

"I'm afraid," said Pierre, "that the next station would have been still worse.

Can you see us, my darling, in the social fabric of the future--the hive they promise us, where none will have the right to live except for the queen bee's service or for the republic?"

"Laying eggs from morning to night like a _mitrailleuse_ or from morning to night licking the eggs of others....

Thank you for that choice!"

said Luce.

"Oh, Luce, little ugly one, how ugly you talk," said Pierre laughing.

"Yes, it's very bad, I know it.

I am good for nothing.

Nor you either, my friend.

You are just as ill fitted for killing or maiming men as I am for sewing them up again, like those wretched horses when they are ripped up at the bullfights, so that they can serve again at the next affray.

We two are useless beings and dangerous, who have the ridiculous, criminal pretention to live only in order to love those we do love, likewise my little lover lad and my friends, honest people and little children, the good light of the day, also good white bread and everything that is pretty and right for me to put in my mouth.

It's shameful, it's shameful!

Blush for me, Pierrot!...

But we shall be well punished!

There is going to be no place for us in that factory of the State, without rest and without truce, which the earth will be soon....

Luckily we shall not be here!"

"Yes, what happiness!"

quoth Pierre.

"If in thine arms, O Lady of my heart, I die, to greater fame I'll not aspire, Content upon thy bosom to expire Whilst kissing thee and thus from living part...."

"Well, little darling, what sort of a fashion is that?"

"Nevertheless it is after a good old French mode.

It's by Ronsard," said Pierre: "...

else I would only claim A century hence, sans glory and sans fame Slothful to die upon thy lap, Cassandra...."

"A hundred years!"

sighed Luce.

"He doesn't ask much!..."

"Or I mistake, or more delights are heaped In death like that than all the honors reaped By Caesar great or firebolt Alexander."

"Naughty, naughty, naughty little scamp!

have you no shame?

In this epoch of heroes!"

"There are too many," said Pierre.

"I would rather be a little fellow who loves, a babe of a man."

"The babe of a woman who still has on his lips the milk from my breast," cried Luce, seizing him round the neck.

"My babe, my own!"